This project is a study of the centrality of clients in the development of psychiatric authority in the early twentieth century. It uses the history of American child psychiatry to examine the interaction of families and professionals, and argues for the importance of class and gender as factors defining the relationship between advisors and the advised. Child psychiatry, which developed in the United States in the context of child guidance clinics, is unique among the helping professions because of the multiplicity of clients it served -- the state, represented by juvenile courts, other public and private welfare agencies, schools, and individual families. All clients identified troublesome children, but eh diversity of their needs pulled child psychiatry in different directions, from a social/environmental interpretation to one that stressed family dynamics, a harsh critique of motherhood and individualized psychotherapy for parents and children. The records of the Judge Baker Children's Center of Boston, one of the country's first child guidance clinics, form the basis for this discussion of psychiatric authority. Through them child psychiatry is shown to have emerged out of a desire by both public authorities and private families to solve the problems of youths posed for adults in a modern, urban, leisure-oriented, consumer society.